Four of us sat in a room in Bangalore. It was some time in 2001. I came down from San Jose, CA. My friend came from Seattle, WA. The other two were from Bangalore. We were discussing some ideas for our first product.
- An Integration Server – something that pulls information from several sources on the web to create your own server and our plan was to build it in XML. I was doing a lot of research in XML at that time and was really excited by the potential of that technology. Our concept was a slice of Web as your own database.
- A product called Intelliweb where you can create a web site with a bunch of semantic components. Our goal was to start with some thing simple – a few components for Dreamweaver which was the most popular web development tool at that time.
- InfoMinder – a tool to track information on the web and send you alerts on changes.
I started the company, inspired by a paper from Tim Berner’s Lee on Semantic Web and created the first version of our website.
In our Bangalore meeting, we asked ourselves a simple question.
Which of these technologies is closest to being delivered?
The answer was InfoMinder. We thought it was a a couple of months to being a product. We also decided to work on intelliweb components in parallel.
This story has a lot of twists and turns. We started on Dreamweaver components. Built a prototype and even gave a demo to Dreamweaver user group in San Francisco. It was well received. We followed it up with some informal market research and concluded that it was not a viable business.
I created a presentation on the Integration Server (we called it XML Server) and tried to raise money. No one understood what the product was (at least the people I met) and why it was needed. So we dropped that.
So why am I writing all this now, almost a decade later? Tara mentioned in a tweet that Internet Archive has over 10 peta bytes of data. So I went back and looked at different snapshots of our site over the years. There were over 82 captures. Here is the link. Here is the ways we morphed.
– A semantic web company
– An XML solutions company
– An Information Tools company
Somewhere around 2004, we stopped updating the website since most of our traffic was coming directly to InfoMinder site. Now that we are planning to launch a couple of products, our website may become active again. iMorph will produce various Information Engines – tools to discover, aggregate, filter and mine web content for your business.